Taking Care of Some Beesness

We have been learning about how to run an apiary and earlier this week we decided to check on how our honey bees are doing.  We have 4 hives right now.  Two are colonies we purchased in 2011 and two are new swarms from last year.  Last year, our colonies began to swarm in March and continued to do so through the summer, so we were afraid they may have been getting ready to do that again.  This time, however, the plan was to head off the swarms by dividing the colony that seemed to be the most active and possibly ready to swarm.

Here are Lisa and Matthew suited up and checking them out.  They are looking at the hive that we thought may be ready to divide.

This was the scene between the super and the top hive body box.

These frames show that some of the brood has been capped, but we were expecting the frames to be completely full and capped.  If they are all like these, then this hive is not ready to divide.



Pulling out a couple more frames.

Here is Lisa examining it.

These are not as full as the first frames checked.  We will check on that hive again in a few weeks to see if they get everything filled up.

They also checked on the other hive that has been most active, which was a new swarm from last year.  They looked good.  The bottom frames are getting filled up nicely. 

All the hives seem to be doing ok, even though none are ready to divide yet.  We had a very cold March, over all, this year and it seems that true Spring weather was slow getting here.  I've noticed that everything is blooming later this year, so I guess the bees are just rounding out everything later as well.  Maybe last year everything was just earlier? 

Thankfully no one was stung very badly during this expedition.  Lisa actually did some bee work all by herself a couple days earlier with no protection except the veil and did not get stung at all.  When these pictures were taken, last Wednesday, the only sting we had was a friend who was visiting.  I was up there very near the bees taking pictures and he was up there also, observing.  Neither of us were wearing any bee protection and he unfortunately got stung on the ear.  Thankfully it didn't swell much and he discovered that he is not allergic to honey bee stings! 

Californy Is The Place To Be - Rabbits, That Is

Yesterday we finally took the plunge into starting a meat rabbit operation!  We bought a pair of 8 week old baby Californian Rabbits from a neighbor over the hill and down the road a ways.  They are unrelated so they should be suitable breeders when they grow up.  The California breed is one of the best for raising meat along with the New Zealand breed.  I'm hoping to get a New Zeland doe kit from a fellow in a couple weeks and have a breeding trio in the future.

We have talked about getting into meat rabbits for years and decided that now was a good time to start.  We've been learning how to care for rabbits with our Angora rabbits and since they are doing well we decided to expand into meat production.  By the way, Snowflake, the Angora doe, thankfully was not pregnant and so we did not have a litter.  They still have their long fur, which probably kept conception from occuring, even though she was mistakenly in the same cage with the male, Wiley, when we got them.  We are not yet ready for baby Angora rabbits.  I'm not  sure we are spending enough time with the three that we have, so we are really not yet ready for a bunch more!

But, caring for the meat rabbits won't take so much time.  We'll let them grow up and have kits which we will make use of for our family table.  Rabbit meat is supposed to be a very lean and healthy meat!

We'll get pictures taken soon, hopefully.  It was a beautiful day today and it would have been a good day to take pictures with the new rabbits.  Lisa, Simon, Timothy and I enjoyed petting and feeding them this afternoon, but Matthew and Christina had the camera with them visiting friends.  When I get pictures, I'll put them here on the blog sooner or later.

Sooner or later has now arrived!  Here are some pictures of them that Matthew took on April 12th.  They had already grown some during that first week!

God is good and we thank Him for our new rabbits!